A Leaf On the Timestream
by the26thDoctor
Summary: With bellies finally full and no one around to chase them, for now, the crew of the Serenity are surprised by their close encounter with a strange blue box floating in space, the man inside it calling himself a Doctor and his beautiful companion. M for swearing in Chinese.


Objects in Time

"Here we are!" the Doctor exclaimed, looking up at Rose from his viewscreen. "Wait no. Oh, yes! We're here!"

"Where's here?" Rose asked, smiling next to the Doctor.

"Well…it seems we're…somewhere in the…26th century. 2517 to be exact. Take a look at this." The Doctor flipped the viewscreen to show Rose. On it were various circles and dots, circling around each other furiously. Hundreds of them, by her reckoning.

"What's that? Some more Gallifreyan?"

"No. Close, but it is actually one giant super-solar system."

"Really?"

"Yeah, several hundred years after your time the Earths all stuffed up with Trillions of people, they needed somewhere to send them. And they found this. A nearly perfect super-solar system. Two main phase stars in a binary orbit tidally linked to a brown dwarf. Couple of dozen earth sized planets in binary orbits, some at Langrangian points. Dozen or so gas giants with several habital moons circling each one. It's almost like this system was designed to be colonized. And that's exactly what you humans did…" the Doctor smiled his cheeky smile. "You brilliant humans. Can't just find one world in one solar system. No, you go and find the most perfectly formed super-solar system in the Galaxy. Brilliant. Really."

"Wow! How many people living here?"

"Couple dozen trillion by this point I suppose. See look here, inner planets are all nice and cozy. But move just outside the first transient asteroid belt and you got the frontier. It's like the old west out there."

"Wow. That's incredible!" Rose exclaimed. "But what we doin' here though? Thought we were supposed to see some swaying mountains or something like that."

"Well, we were…" The Doctor said. He put on his brainy specs and flipped the viewscreen back. "But the TARDIS dragged us here. Some kind of temporal-spatial anomaly or something like that."

"Right, well we gonna land here or just float about in space?" Rose asked.

"Soon as I find us a nice…relatively peaceful place we'll have a look about."

"Right then. I'm gonna go get ready."

Rose started to wonder off to the wardrobe. Suddenly the TARDIS shook violently, her cloister bell going off. The Doctor and Rose instinctively grabbed onto the railing and held while the worst of the shaking and shimmering rattled on.

"Hang on!" The Doctor yelled as he lunged towards to Capulian regulator. With a swift thrust he stabilized the environment. Harmless steam poured out of some vents while Rose grabbed a fire extinguisher to put out a smile flame near the front door.

"What the hell happened, Doctor?" She shouted.

"We…what! We collided with something! We collided with something?"

"Well did we or didn't we?"

"Yeah, but it doesn't make sense. The TARDIS should have read the flight path and put us somewhere else." The Doctor ran to the front door of the TARDIS and flung it open. His look of shock had a hint of disgust in it. "We crashed into _that_!"

..

"What in the Gorram hell was that?" Mal exclaimed as soon as he felt his ship crash.

"Um…I don't know, it just appeared!" Wash shouted back, flipping his three switched and struggling to regain control of the Serenity.

"What do you mean it just appeared?"

"Well usually when someone says that, Captain, it means something that wasn't the before is there now!"

"Alliance?"

"Haven't got anything on radar, sir." Zoe dutifully said back.

"How bad's the damage?" Mal looked at the husband and wife, who just shrugged.

"Ta ma di diyu" Mal exclaimed in Chinese "Kaylee! What'd you do!" He shouted back at the ship. Kaylee popped her head into the Bridge, some popcorn in her mouth.

"Nothing, Cap'n. I was watchin' a vid. All of a sudden a heard this ruckus. What's goin'" on?" Her backwoodsy, country cuteness was enough to keep Mal from flying off the handle. For now.

"What happened is Wash crashed into something."

"Did he not just here my whole thing about appeared out of nowhere?" Wash asked Zoe, who just shrugged at him.

"Sir, we need to find out what hit us."

"Right, bring her about and let's take a look."

Wash expertly piloted the Serenity around. "Can I get a gorram damage report?" Mal shouted at no one in particular.

"All the systems seem fine sir. If anything just a minor scrape with an asteroid or something."

"It wasn't an asteroid, Zo." Wash retorted.

"And it wasn't minor, neither. Were you here? Did you feel the ship shutter like a green girl on Newhope on payday?"

"Wow, that's a really specific reference, Captain. Come from experience." Wash smiled at his wit, but the smile faded as soon as he turned and saw Mal staring daggers at him. "Right, we're about to come into visual contact. Now."

"Ta me de wo what is that?" Mal said.

"Sir…I don't know…it looks…" Zoe couldn't finish. Wash was too busy being quiet to avoid Mal's wrath. Kaylee was still popping corn kernels in her mouth when she finally spoke up.

"Looks like a public police call box." She said innocently.

"A what?" Zoe asked.

"Yeah. You know like in them old movies in England."

"What's a public police call box?" Zoe asked.

"I dunno. Guess they used it to call people when they were trouble."

"Am I the only one here, and excuse me if I'm wrong, who has the more valid question? What's it doing in space?"

"Why don't you ask the guy pokin' his head out."

Mal, Zoe and Wash all turned and were completely dumbfounded. Poking out of the window was a man. A man with horn-rimmed glasses and amazing hair. And he looked just as confused as them. He looked about for a moment, then saw them looking at him. His smile was casual…casual, even though he was a man sticking his head out of a police box floating in outer space that had just been hit by a very large spaceship. He motioned with his hand to give them one moment and dodged back inside his…phone booth.

"What…in the hell…was that!" Wash asked, letting out a giddy laugh at the end.

Mal looked at Zoe. "Don't look at me! He's the one who wrecked into a phone booth."

"I didn't wreck into it, it just appeared!"

"Things don't just appear, Wash. It's blue and it's a Ta me de phone booth. How could you miss it."

"I know this is an apparently difficult idea to get your head around, Captain, but it just wasn't there before."

"Things don't just pop into being out of the ether, Wash."

"Well then how'd it pop back into the ether, Cap'n?" Kaylee said, pointing at where the phone box used to be.

"Where the hell did it go! Run a scan or something, Zoe!"

"And scan for what exactly? Evidence of telephone usage in the area?"

Before Mal could come up with something angrily witty to say back, he heard Jayne's heavy footsteps running towards them and instinctively turned around. He had trained himself to do this mostly because he didn't trust the big brute, but Jayne very rarely ran. Something had happened.

"Mal, you gotta look what's in the hold. I was just standing there, pumping weights and all the sudden it just…it just appeared outta no where!"

"Thank you, Jayne! See, I'm not running into things here, things are just popping into existence." Wash said.

"Lemme guess: it's a phone box." Mal said with exasperation.

"Well…yeah. At least I think it is. Says Police on it though, so…I didn't wanna be around it too long."

"Well then, since they boarded my ship without permission, let's go see what in the Verse he wants." With that Mal shoved Kaylee out of the way and charged to the back of the ship. Wash and Zoe looked at each other then bounded out of their seats behind him, nearly knocking Kaylee over.

"Guys watch out!" She yelled as she dropped her popcorn. "I wasn't eaten that or anything!"

"Clean that up, Kaylee, we got visitors." Mal shot back. Kaylee looked at Jayne.

"You goin back with em?" She asked.

"Hell no I ain't goin' back there. That blue box says police on it and I got priors." Jayne said as he took the pilot seat, knowing he wasn't supposed to be sitting there but not caring.

The trio made their way back to the cargo hold and, surprisingly not surprised, they found the wayward box. Mal descended the stairs first, hand on his pistol. Wash stayed up top just in case there was anything dangerous coming out of that thing, while Zoe posted up just below halfway down the stairs, her own gun at the ready. Mal turned and looked back at the two, his facing "oh come on, don't leave me alone down here!" But it was too late. The front door to the box swung open majestically. A moment later- and rather unmajestically- the same man they saw earlier peaked his head out of the box. He looked around for a bit again, then flashed that same smile at them as he had before. It had a weird effect on the trio. A moment ago they had all been on edge, but something in his smile and his demeanor told them nothing was to be feared from this man. It was the first time in any of their lives that their gut had been wrong about something.

"Oh! Hello! Sorry bout crashing into your little ship there. Sometimes she gets a bit fussy, this one does. I'm The Doctor. Rose! Come on out, they just have guns!" He smiled back at them, his hands in his pants pocket, coat billowing around him. "So. Got any danger to speak of?"

Mal looked back at Zoe and Wash, then back at the Doctor, his mouth agape.

"What? Was it something I said?"


End file.
